One of the long term aims of the HK education reform is to develop creativity in students. One of the crucial visions concluded from the reform conference held by the Education Commission(2000) is to construct a learning environment for the students in which the spirit of exploration can be cultivated and creativity stimulated.,

The insufficiency of current status

In this age of information boom, the traditional way of knowledge transmission in classroom is apparently insufficient to cope with the growth of knowledge. Uni-driectional teaching is also argued to be a cause of the decline of learning motivation.

Though the Education Commission made an emphasis on cultivating creativity, it seems that it didn't provide a clear and through instructions or a concrete plan on how this agenda could be executed in the future. We are not surprised for three reasons. Firstly, the corresponding department did not have substantiated evidence from research literature despite their having the vision. Secondly, teachers who have ever received training on creative teaching strategies are the minority. Lastly, there exists a civilization gap between creativity education which originates from the West and Hong Kong which belongs to the East.

Not only is the learning motivation yet to be improved, the training on generic skills is also being neglected in current teaching practice.

Vision

What we are proposing is to complement traditional classroom with more creative teaching strategies. We believe it should guarantee an improvement of the effectiveness of learning, especially in dreas of learning motivation, efficacy of teaching in classroom. This should also provide the marginalzed students (e.g., students of lower capacity or attention, etc.) with better learning opportunities.

The needs to master creative teaching strategies in teachers

If a school is to cultivate creativity, it should take the initiative to equip their teachers with creativity.

Two interrelated areas should be focued to bring along such a transformation. 1.) to cultivate creativity in teachers; 2.) to train the teachers to apply creativity in teaching.

“Creative teaching strategies” is a new area to teachers. The effectiveness of learning these strategies depends on how well they could master the right set of skills. Through in-depth discussion with interested schools, this project will organize teacher trainging of different levels which should respond to the needs of different teachers.